What If ‘Citizens United’ Actually United the Citizens?

January 25, 2012

After a long, dark period of stagnation and pay-to-play politics, we’ve just seen a flurry of progressive victories that could upset the conventional wisdom about a post–Citizens United world.

Citizens United has reshaped the landscape, paving the way for the proliferation of political ads in early primary states, many of which would formerly have been illegal. There is no denying the decision’s impact on nearly every issue: spending legalized by Citizens United was partly responsible for Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin in 2010, and, moving forward, Citizens United–enabled ads will be full of messages about President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline. But another, albeit indirect, result of Citizens United is actually a positive one: a realization by progressive groups that financial competition is futile—prompting altered strategies that play to progressives’ strengths.

Consider the events leading up to the Senate’s January 20 decision to postpone the Protect Intellectual Property Act vote, which would have been almost unimaginable just one week before, when PIPA and its House counterpart, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), were considered done deals. Only an awkward alliance of political geeks and new-media companies stood in the way of an entertainment industry power grab. But the bills’ promoters failed to anticipate the power of “Blackout Wednesday” to popularize the outrage. Suddenly, Congress started fielding calls from people unable to sell couches on Craigslist and harried parents of students desperate to consult Wikipedia for school papers. Thus sounded the death knell for the bills.

The tactical decision to pull down popular websites was tailored to these bills, but two other recent victories—the rejection of the massive Keystone oil pipeline and the submission of more than a million signatures for the recall of unionbusting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—were also made possible by fusing old-school community organizing with innovative netroots strategies.

The Keystone pipeline deal was all but signed when a small band of climate activists mounted a week of direct action at the White House this past summer. As the civil disobedience peaked, groups quickly followed up with sustained organizing of Obama volunteers and donors who publicly committed themselves to withhold re-election support if the pipeline was approved. In the final tally, there were more than 1,000 arrests and more than 1 million petition signatures. Public statements flooded the White House, and Washington received close to 40,000 calls opposing the pipeline in one day.

The Wisconsin recall effort, netting more than 1 million signatures, is a similar story of block-by-block organizing coordinated with savvy online work [see John Nichols, page 6].

None of this is to say that money doesn’t matter and political ads are on their way out. After all, $13 million was spent on ads in the lead-up to the South Carolina primary, and $12 million is now pouring into Florida. The result of Citizens United has been more ads, by less identifiable players, with a much uglier tone. The decision should be overturned.

At the same time, though, this onslaught of ads has made Americans crave limits on election spending. A new CBS poll shows that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents favor limits both on how much individuals can give to candidates and how much outside groups can spend on ads. A total of 67 percent of respondents said outside spending should be limited, and less than a third favored the current system. A different poll shows that two-thirds of small business owners believe that Citizens United hurts their interests.

The influx of such huge sums of money has also forced smaller groups to re-evaluate their reliance on a saturated media market to deliver a message, and has catalyzed new investment in breakthrough organizing. The popular momentum behind such campaigns may well be evidence that instead of disengaging in a post–Citizens United world, voters jump at concrete opportunities to show their power.

Ilyse HogueTwitter Ilyse Hogue, a social change practitioner, media consumer and analyst, and online engagement expert, is the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Previously, she served as Co-Director of Friends of Democracy, a 2012 initiative to build political power around the issue of money in politics and as Senior Adviser to Media Matters for America where she focused on advocacy programs to undercut the power of right-wing media. From 2006- 2011, Ilyse was Director of Political Advocacy and Communications for MoveOn.org. In her over five years at MoveOn, she was responsible for shaping political strategy and developing communications initiatives to give MoveOn's five million members a voice in Washington. An expert in both electoral and advocacy campaigns, she has mobilized MoveOn members and worked closely with leaders in Congress and the White House to advocate for progressive legislation on financial regulatory reform and health care. In these capacities, she has served as a spokesperson to the media, frequently analyzing breaking news on both televisions and in print.
Prior to joining MoveOn, Ilyse was Program Director at the Rainforest Action Network, where she spent six years pioneering and implementing corporate advocacy campaigns in the banking, forest, and other sectors. She was the recipient of the Business Ethics Network award in 2005 for her work in the financial sector, a campaign that was ultimately instrumental in moving over 60 multinational banks to adopt a groundbreaking framework of environmental standards for private investment known as the Equator Principles. These principles led to a host of voluntary initiatives in the US banking sector, including from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Ilyse was the chief negotiator in each of those agreements and worked to market them to a spectrum of constituencies, from institutional investors to environmental NGOs. A Harvard Business School case study was written in 2005 about this work, and she has lectured on it at Yale and Columbia. She has been a frequent speaker and writer about corporate power, corporate accountability and multi-national institutions that govern financial and corporate behavior. Ilyse was very involved in the global justice movement, traveling from Seattle to South Africa and many places in between working with international allies on corporate power.
She is the co-founder of smartMeme Strategy and Training project which works to amplify the impact of grassroots organizing with new strategy and training resources, values based communications, collaborations, and meme campaigning. Ilyse serves on the board of Rebuild the Dream, Oil Change International, Story of Stuff, and National Domestic Worker's Alliance. Ilyse holds an M.S. in Resource Ecology Management from the University of Michigan where she studied the impact of resource constraints in politics and culture. Her BA is from Vassar College.